March 15, 2007

• Is there something these companies know about Splenda that make them feel the need to buy all these domain names before someone else can? Interesting read. Personally, I don't touch the stuff. It seems a bit silly that they would buy up so many "negative" domain names - as coming up with a variation (if someone wanted to) would be very simple (not to mention the use of hyphens, which someone commented on).
• From a marketing point of view, this just makes good sense. It's de rigeur to purchase company name analog domains to use as referrers and forestall 404's (e.g., "gemeralmotors.com"), why not to preemptively manage crisis? Crises occur. Sometimes they are earned, sometimes they are simply bad luck, poor science, or the malevolence of motivated detractors. While this particular example is fairly prescient for a company (most, in my experience, are woefully unprepared for any sort of PR or image crisis, and generally make poor decisions when one happens), there's no necessarily nefarious impetus in play to buck the usual corporate inertia and enact smart decisions ahead of time.
• SMT makes a good point, though. Hyphens. Underscores, text rebuses, smart phrasing, homonyms and onomatopoeia, all could easily floof the best laid plans. The net is a dangerous battleground.
• The net is a dangerous battleground. Indeed! *adjusts tin foil body armor*
• "floof Word not found in the Dictionary and Encyclopedia. Did you mean: Floob FLOF kloof Foof Flooz FLOOT floor Flook flood aloof Loof Some articles that match your query: Esa-Pekka Salonen Salonen, Esa-Pekka " Man, I don't understand the Intertubes at all.
• Two things make this worrisome: 1) No independent studies of Splenda's effects on the human body have been conducted. 2) No studies (independent of proprietary) have been conducted that gauge its long term health effects.
• Another reason why I do not touch it, Nick. They don't call me sugar for nothing!
• I was hoping there would be some insight and/or links to if it's actually bad for us or not. ("Bad" being somewhat relative, of course.) Should I avoid it any more or less than Nutrasweet? splendadiabetes.com Heh. I read that as "splendabetes.com". Mine is much cooler.
• Well, it must have passed FDA approval. That's not a guarantee of safety, obviously, but it does insure some fairly good minimum standards. As far as long term, it simply hasn't been around long enough to gauge long term health effects. One could say the same about a lot of products. One thing that I think detracts from the worrisomeness is that IF something were wrong with Splenda and J&J knew this and were buying up domains preemptively, they'd be demonstrating foreknowledge of ill effect, and would be effectively bending over and providing whatever court the inevitable flurry of suits finally landed in a great big butthole to hammer a class action spike into. They have lawyers. They would know this.
• Not to mention that it tastes like ass. Saying that you think Splenda tastes like sugar is like saying that you think Coors Light tastes like beer. Both are products that I'm always shocked to see in someone else's shopping cart.
• Hehe. Nice wordage there Fes! :) A person I know who is old and wise likes to say "lawyers don't know anything". Usually as a part of some convoluted story involving a slew of lawyers who missed the giant red blinking text of the contract that said "DO NOT DO X" and advised the client to do X immediately. Of course, old people say a lot of things.
• Well, the cigarette companies had lawyers too. Somehow they still decided to market cigs to teenagers using a cartoon camel. And, you know, write each other memos to that effect.
• I agree that this is a good pre-emptive business move, even if they haves no reason to believe a problem is looming. It costs virtually nothing and makes the detractors' job just that much harder. Sure, the haters can just add hyphens or change spelling, but they reach fewer eyeballs when they have to do that.
• Somehow they still decided to market cigs to teenagers using a cartoon camel. Truth. Never underestimate the raw anarchic power of pure, undiluted human fuckery.
• As for sucralose and nutra-sweet...I try hard to avoid them, but it's near impossible to buy a pack of gum that doesn't contain atrificial sweetener of some kind. 8-weeks to Optimum Health by Dr. Andrew Weil advocated avoiding all artificial sweeteners, and cited evidence that they (aspartame, at least) had some crazy effects on the body, including changing menstrual cycles. He justified it to dieters by claiming that nobody ever lost weight by eating less sugar.
• Honey, molasses, maple syrup, turbinado even. They're all better for you than sugar, and can certainly serve as substitutes in your own kitchen. Might be an acquired taste, but so is the foulness of splenda and nutrasweet.
• Honey is bee poop.
• And maple syrup is tree smegma. Anyway, the fools didn't register splendaanalprolapse.com. Meesa gonna be rich.
• No. Honey is bee barf. This has already been established in the bee thread. I have never understood the point of fake sweeteners. Just use less of the real stuff, or nothing at all. A little self control, poeple. Jeesh. I guess self control is too much to ask of people now-a-days
• MonkeyFilter: No studies (independent or proprietary) have been conducted that gauge its long term health effects MonkeyFilter: Never underestimate the raw anarchic power of pure, undiluted human fuckery
• Well, it must have passed FDA approval. So did cigarettes.
• Or human floofery.
• Thank you, HW, for releving me of the tedious task of tagging those. You're a sweet heart. Pure shurgar babe!

• I have never understood the point of fake sweeteners. Just use less of the real stuff, or nothing at all. A little self control, poeple. Jeesh. I guess self control is too much to ask of people now-a-days

  For what it's worth, I know somebody who recently developed insulin issues, and now must avoid processed sugar. It's easy to say "Just avoid it"--but when you've spent your whole life enjoying sweets, it's a bit of a psychological shock to have to cut them out entirely. Artificial sweeteners do not taste like real sugar, true, but if you have to have something sweet, and you've eaten all the apples you can eat, artificial sweeteners can be better than nothing.
• > Apparently this is some sort of preemptive strike for when publicity eventually turns against them? Aren't they just assuming that splenda will be attacked the way aspartame has been? It's a good bet, imo. The New Yorker had an interesting article on artifical sweeteners last year. Here's a summary (possibly machine written).
• As a medical transcriptionist who regularly researches reports, I have noticed that artificial sweeteners are often cited for screwing up diabetics by confusing their bodies into thinking there's incoming sugar when in fact the substance is artificial sweetener. I assiduously avoid all artificial sweeteners. If I want gum I buy Juicy Fruit or Doublemint, both of which still contain good old fashioned sugar. I have no desire to become another long-term guinea pig for corporate interests. Always, look for the buck. Huge food megacorps have figured out that they can make a ton'o'bucks by selling the illusion that dieters and diabetics can enjoy unlimited sweets. The surge in overweight and diabetic people is directly linked to poor diet and a sedentary lifestyle, both of which are facilitated by this illusion. And on and on it goes--more dieters and diabetics to sell Splenda to. No wonder they want to suppress negative product information--the stakes are too bloody high. Me thinks (the Splenda folk) doth protest too much.
• splendaanalprobe.jobs ADD NOW - $25 off your first year! Ground floor, people! Who wants in?! I think it's an interesting strategy but splendasucks.co.uk splendasucks.eu splendasucks.cc . . are the basics, and they're open still. Plus maintenance on a huge spreadsheet of potentially embarassing names is costly and ultimately pointless. I can see how a program director would approve this strategy but it's still costly and pointless. And I want 35mg of caffiene in a cola-flavored 12oz fizzy solution every 20 minutes until I say stop. Splenda, nutrasweet, honey-happy-bubble-soy-what-the-boink-ever is fine, but 200 calores each is too much. Make it happen Poindexter, calorie free/low calorie caffienated fizzy beverage that doesn't kill us - capiche?! Let's go we got domains to move! *clap!* *clap!* *shllrrppp*
• Kinnakeet, can you point me towards one of those studies? I'd be very interested in passing them along to my friend.
• But they can't stop things without "splenda" in the site name like Splenda and Sucralose Toxicity Information Center and Sugar substitutes and the potential danger of Splenda, and they didn't preempt www.splendaexposed.com; people who want to websearch for "splenda" can still find bad stuff about it.
• In Splenda®: Is It Safe Or Not? Dr. Janet Hull reveals the scientific evidence strongly suggesting the chemical sweetener sucralose may harm your body Yeah, not really that either. I know there's no "yes or no" that a study can state but just admonitions to stay away from sugar substitutes isn't what I'm looking for. Besides, that site reads like a big ad. Which I guess it is. Medical journals. That kinda thing. Another reason the "pre-emptive domain registration" plan is fairly pointless.
• A bit off topicl: I had Splenda for the first time in my life a few months ago. I made a cuppa tea here at work and didn't realize until afterwards that the break room was out of real sugar. Needing sweetener, I grabbed one pack of Splenda, thinking that sweetener is sweetener, right? Wrong. Within 20 minutes of drinking that tea, I had to run to the bathroom with stomach cramps and puked until I was dry heaving. My head hurt, my mouth was tingly, and I felt ill for the rest of the day. I had no idea that Splenda was so evil until I did a bit of internet research. Now I know!
• Tastes like sugar cause it's made from sugar! And Chlorine!
• You're not going to be happy about what's lurking in that salt shaker, either.
• Na.
• Yeah, but my body requires that for life. Besides, you gotta admit, my new slogan's kind of got a nice ring to it.
• I think we should just stop eating entirely. Drinking should suffice.
• If only someone would develop a way to deliver the goodness of grain in liquid form...
• well, IANAS, but mr. medusa is. he uses Splenda in his coffee every morning, and has not reported any ill effects. splenda is dextrose (a non-digestible sugar) + sucralose together, a VERY small amount of sucralose is necessary to create a lot of sweetness. I am not saying that these concerns are unwarranted, I am personally in the camp that a small amount of the "real thing" is better than any amount of the fake stuff (ie butter v. margarine) but there is no body of evidence yet and that works both ways. *brought to you by the I-Love-Splenda-Foundation (they pay VERY well)*
• I don't like Splenda, because of the funky aftertaste. I used to temp for a law firm, which I loved, and I never signed a NDA, and anyway this happened after I left, so it should be OK to post. A friend who stayed longer than I did told me about it: Someone sued Splenda over something, some kind of infringement. Prior to that, we had Splenda at every coffee maker in the building. But the firm was representing one of the parties in the suit, probably the people suing Splenda, so someone had to go around to every beverage station in the building and remove all the Splenda. Even having it available for employees to use was considered a conflict of interests.
• PS - aside from honey, molasses, etc, try liquid Stevia extract. It's a sweet-tasting herb. It's tooth-crunchingly sweet, actually, and great for people who like to put three or four tablespoons of sugar into a cup of coffee or tea. I can't even use it in green tea, because it overwhelms the flavor so much, but three or four drops is like three tablespoons of sugar. FWIW, I prefer honey.
• I prefer honey, too, but I find that if I have too much (more than about a tsp every couple of days) it messes with my allergies (I find the same with beer: if I have more than one I have hayfever the next day). If I eat very local honey it doesn't affect me as badly, but very local honey is a) hard to find (and sometimes the sellers are very vague about "local") and b) expensive. We also don't keep much sugar in the house because Mr. meredithea is a type I diabetic. Living around his diet soft drinks has given me a weakness for Diet Pepsi, and I'll have two or three a week. I should probably switch back to unsweetened tea, but I figure this is a pretty mild vice.
• I always thought that was cool . . . local honey is made with local plants, therefore you have some immunity to that from continual exposure to local pollen and trees. What I think is really neat, people who suffer from hayfever can build up some immunity to it by eating a little local bee pollen and honey every day.
• Honeycomb's good for chewin' too. As long as it's not full of bees. I cannot stress this enough.
• meredithea, oh my god! I've been waking up and having sneezing fits for a few months now and I never tied it to my wind-down beer every evening. I'll have to go without for a while to see if the sneezing stops, because it's very annoying.
• I'll have to go without for a while... Sounds a bit drastic.